In Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, Peter Menzel and
Faith D’Alusio take you on a culinary world tour visiting 30
families in 24 countries capturing what they eat during the course
of one week. Each family’s portrait is taken alongside their
weekly groceries, which is accompanied with a detailed list of their
food expenditures. Menzel photographs the families at home and in
the market, while D’Alusio collects their stories, concerns
and food preferences. The two make a powerful team revealing much
about what the world eats and reflecting changes in food consumption
that are happening on a global scale. The photographs illustrate
industrialization and globalization: the ubiquity of carbonated sugar
water, a shift toward prepared and packaged items, and diets independent
of regional and seasonal foods. Hungry Planet also shows
diets controlled by conflict: D’jimia, a mother of five cooks
international food aid in a refugee camp in Chad while reminiscing
about her mango trees and farm in Darfur, Sudan. Diets of poverty
are presented in these pages, but even more present are diets of
plenty and the epidemic of obesity they represent. In contrast is
the cheery photograph of the Ayme family of Ecuador. While they are
struggling subsistence farmers, they note they are “pobre pero
sano”—poor but healthy.

Essays from Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, and others compliment
Menzel’s photos and D’Alusio’s narrative. Hungry
Planet concludes with an informative table presenting statistics
of each of the countries featured in the book, like the number of
McDonald’s; annual per capita meat, cigarette, and alcohol
consumption; daily caloric intake; life expectancy and much more.

If we are what we eat, Hungry Planet is an important book
that shows us more about who we are. Here is a sampling of some of
the families featured in the book.—S.I.